The Home of Australian Craft Beer

New Beers

Barely a day goes by without another seasonal or one-off special flying out of an Australian brewery (if not ten). Here and in our weekly newsletter, we'll bring you news and, if we've sampled them, our take on as many of them as possible. Happy hunting!

Tapped December 5th, 2018

Mum always brought fruit salad to summer barbecues. Bringing a four-pack of El Dorado SHIPAs is practically the same thing, right?
While it’s labelled as a West Coast style IPA, this one’s at the gentler end of Ballistic’s SHIPA (single hop IPA) offerings to date. It offers up pineapple and pawpaw on the nose, but the flavours tend more towards mango and bright, fresh watermelon. A low malt body gives the El Dorado more quaffability than its brothers, which works well for a summer release.…
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Tapped December 5th, 2018

Just as the NES led us to the Super Nintendo, and the Sega Master System made the Mega Drive possible, Stockade’s 8bit IPA has laid the foundation for its levelled up version, 16bit IIPA.
Keen observers may have noticed that Stockade had to remove the cartoon character from the 8bit label, but the transient 16bit is able to sport a pixelated hop hulk and be gone before it can cause any trouble. But not before leaving a mark on our impressionable taste buds.
With its rich orange colour, it may look…
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Tapped December 4th, 2018

Picture the scene... It's late summer in Leongatha in the heart of Gippsland's pristine dairy country. There, in an orchard sat amid green, rolling hills, sits a single greengage tree. Up wanders a nine-year-old boy, the youngest of three, under a tumble of blond curls. Hoping no one is looking, reaches up and helps himself to fruit after fruit after fruit, wallowing in the sugary, sweet flesh. Though he doesn't yet know it, childhood nostalgia is made of such moments.
"Will!" comes a voice…
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Tapped December 4th, 2018

Van Dieman has been making more and more use of the bounty of its family farm in recent years. And, for Bramble, cast the net a little wider and added some juicy, "almost overripe" blackberries to the mix in another fruited farmhouse style ale. And it's up there as one of the funkier creations to come our way.
Indeed, while to taste there's much that's reminiscent of a soft, summery table wine to this barrel-fermented saison – summer and autumn berries, a gentle acidity – on the nose…
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Tapped December 3rd, 2018

As we've written in the past, while they're relatively scarce compared to beers featuring some other spirits, local brewers' partnerships with the world of gin have tended to prove rather successful. Among those to impress in 2018 was Wolf Of The Willows' Tom Collins-inspired GABS festival beer. It was created with Brunswick's Patient Wolf, who have now embarked on a second canine (or at least canine-lupine) collaboration as the year winds down.
It's a rather different beast to that debuted in May,…
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Tapped December 3rd, 2018

The rise of the beer advent calendar and the lengths many of those behind them go to in order to source brand new beers from brewers is threatening to turn December into a mini-May. And, no, this isn't an obscure reference to the British sitcom that ran from 1989 to 1994 (the usefulness or otherwise of obscure pop culture references from 1980s Britain was made abundantly clear to He-Man during his recent WA Beer Week appearance with Beer Sucks). Instead, it's a rather more straightforward reference…
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Tapped December 3rd, 2018

Use of the term Table Beer is becoming increasingly common among Australian brewers. As with many terms plucked from history – such as farmhouse ale with its origins in the same region of the world – it's a pretty broad church, taking in typically lower alcohol beers once served from jugs with a meal. But, given table beer's origins in parts of France and Belgium, those created locally tend to take inspiration from there too, often using farmhouse yeast strains and favouring malt and yeast-derived…
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Tapped December 1st, 2018

Otherside get in the festive spirit by ramping up their Anthem IPA. The Experimental Series DDH – Double Dry Hopped – release not only magnifies the original beer's tropical characters but also bumps up the booze by half a percent, enough to make chatting at the Christmas party that little bit more interesting and free-flowing.
Slightly more orange in the glass than it’s sibling, DDH Anthem’s massive fruity aroma is unavoidable, particularly the melon characters which dominate. The familiar…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

At the sours blind tasting we held as part of WA Beer Week in 2018, it was fascinating to see where different attendees' preferences lay, from those who enjoyed those of a hoppy and low acidity bent to those who were all over the fruit and others that were looking for the funk. And, with this new "tropical sour", the Wolf Of The Willows team almost appear to be attempting to cover all bases, melding the yeast they feature in their Acidulus range with pineapple, guava and mango juices as…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

What is a hamfish? And what relation does it have to the Brut IPA style?
Well, it turns out Hamfish is the nickname of Mornington brewer Hamish and, when the team there was thinking about a name for this Brut IPA they deemed it appropriate. Why? They figured there was a "pompous beer-wankiness" to the style and Hamfish was its "vulgar antithesis" – a means of "taking the piss out of the style and ourselves for being late to the Brut IPA party".
For all that there's…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

The second Hargreaves Hill spirit-inspired sours released in quick succession in 2018 is a Margarita Gose. Like the brewery’s collaboration with Four Pillars Distillery, the Gin Barrel Gose, it’s also not the first incarnation of the beer – a version of the beer first made its way through venues in 2017.
Using tequila-soaked kaffir lime leaves, fresh lime juice and both lemon and lime peel, put simply it’s a beer that’s big on the citrus. While there’s an undoubted tart and sour edge,…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

When Burnley’s head brewer, Michael Stanzel, was 22, he made the move to Germany to study brewing in the land of lager and hefe. And, if the second lager to join the brewery's core range is anything to go by, it seems like he paid attention during those (presumably) exacting days learning about pilsners.
Pils is a beer that – a little like the brewer himself – is built with traditional sensibilities but has at least one foot planted in the modern world. Made according to the Reinheitsgebot…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

For the third release in its Restaurant Series of collabs, Bridge Road Brewers technically collaborated with the team at Adelaide's Africola. But they managed to enlist the help of a restaurant rather closer to home too, obtaining chinotto fruit from Michael Ryan at Beechworth restaurant Provenance. The citrus was added to a Belgian saison base with the aim of creating something to match the Adelaide venue's South African BBQ style cuisine.
What you get is a pale gold pour, unlike the soft drinks…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

Burnley Brewing’s Coffee Brown cans may have been released as the brewery celebrated its first birthday but the beer has been a part of the operation since the very beginning. Eager to make a beer that was distinctly “Melbourne”, head brewer Michael Stanzel asked one of Burnley’s owners, Phil Gijsbers - who also happens to own These Days Coffee Roastery - to score him some beans. The benefit of Phil owning both a roastery and a brewery goes beyond the presumed discount when trading between…
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Tapped November 30th, 2018

While initially evoking thoughts of the mid-90s Pauly Shore vehicle, Biodome, the troposphere is actually the lower layer of the earth’s atmosphere, one which appears as various shades of orange when viewed from space should you ever be lucky enough to take a trip there. While the intention behind the name of Innate's new addition to its core range was to conjure thoughts of a more tropical bent, the colour of the troposphere isn't far removed from what arrives in the glass.
Citra, Galaxy and…
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Tapped November 29th, 2018

It appears the dogs have won the day at Wayward. Until recently there’d been a low level feline/canine power struggle at the brewery where you’d find cat prints all over the actual beers – the likes of Sourpuss, Passion Of The Puss and even an entire Festival Of The Puss – while pups strutted around the brewery itself to be immortalised on the famed Dogs Of Wayward photo wall.
But, with the recent rebrand of Wayward’s beers, cats are evidently on the way out. The AIBA trophy-winning Sourpuss…
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Tapped November 29th, 2018

Of all their Barrel Breed releases, the Christmas Ale is the one with which the Goat brewers give themselves the most room for manoeuvre. Sure, they'll tweak the recipe and the barrels-of-choice for their annual Barleywine and Imperial Stout offerings, but given "Christmas Ale" isn't a style as such, they've flitted from Belgian quad through delicate strong golden ale to the 2018 festive fare, which is their first wheatwine; in other words a big beast of a beer built upon a grain bill featuring…
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Tapped November 29th, 2018

Made in collaboration with Petition Beer Corner for their epic Collabosaurus WA Beer Week event, Lil Sebastian’s heart belongs to a tiny horse from the comedy series, Parks and Recreation. The venue’s team member Laura Thomas suggested the name with the miniature beer in mind, however the result is a something of grander stature as a result of the second in the Nowhereman Bartender Collab series.
Idaho 7 hops were used throughout the New World beer, yet six weeks of lagering shows old school…
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Tapped November 29th, 2018

Pushing the postcodes of collaboration, Nowhereman invited the combined teams of Fremantle sister venues Strange Company and Ronnie Nights to develop a beer that best represents the venues. The lively siblings share a fondness for using shrubs, a type of vinegared syrup, in cocktails. So, in paying homage to this, an Oleo-Saccharum technique was used in which citrus peel is sealed in sugar to draw the oils into an increasingly concentrated citrus syrup.
While all of this sounds rather fancy, the…
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Red

Style

Blood Orange & Mandarin Sour

ABV

4.0%

Stockists

Available from Nowhereman, Strange Company and Ronnie Nights in limited release

Tapped November 29th, 2018

Named after his newborn daughter Miia, head brewer Eddie Still’s mind may well have been fighting evil with hops as the colourful decal suggests, yet there's a good chance that it came about as he had a little time waiting for her arrival so why not brew another beer? Whatever the case, Miia delivers punchy hop characters but still sits comfortably within Nowhereman’s approachability driven ethos.
An El Dorado heavy trio of hops have left some welcome hop haze in the glass, creating fruity aromas…
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The Crafty Pint is an independent online magazine and resource for anyone interested in craft beer in Australia. We bring an honest, old-fashioned journalistic approach to beer's brave new world, telling stories because they're worth telling not because someone is paying us to write them.

Like many of the people who have changed the face of beer in Australia, we believe in authenticity, integrity, enjoyment and love. We hope to play a role in helping good beer, brewed by good people, find its way into the hands of more drinkers.